Joy: A Manic Cinderella Gets the Job Done

David O. Russell’s quirky hero proves that in his filmmaking, buoyant, messy exuberance has its limits.

December 24, 2015

Writer-director
David O. Russell loves the chaotic vitality of everyday life so much, it
doesn’t appear to bother him that his vibrant movies don’t resemble reality at
all.

The five-time Oscar-nominee has brought a screwy energy and an almost fairytale-like effervescence to his recent films, The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook
and American Hustle, by
championing ordinary Joes and Janes who wrestle with external obstacles and
their own quirky failings. Russell’s characters may be mired in the mundane,
but his movies are impassioned vehicles, teleporting his heroes onto a more
exciting, dramatic plane. Russell turns real life into a movie—the kind that
has a happy ending and an optimistic belief that none of us is beyond saving.

The
filmmaker’s latest, however, suggests that his buoyant, messy exuberance has
its limits. Joy features enough of
Russell’s usual headlong rush and only-in-America peculiarity that it gives off
a consistently fizzy pleasure. But it’s also the most exhausting film from this
stage of his career, which restarted with 2010’s critically and commercially successful
The Fighter after years of inactivity
and aborted projects. Teaming up with Jennifer Lawrence for a third straight movie,
Russell wildly doubles-down on
everything that earned him acclaim over the last five years.In those other
recent outings, he felt swept away by the dizzying swirl of life that he
orchestrated—but in Joy, it often
feels like he’s just pushing the same old buttons.

Joy is the third of his last four films to be based on a true
story, but as has often been the case with Russell, the real Joy is merely a
starting point for the filmmaker to weave a more personal tale. Lawrence plays
a woman loosely inspired by Joy
Mangano, a New York entrepreneur and single mother who invented the Miracle
Mop in 1990, soon becoming a fixture of the cable shopping networks QVC and
HSN. In the film, the character’s last name is never used and other
biographical details are altered. Instead the story focuses on Joy’s attempt to
break free of her unsupportive father (a dispiritingly one-note Robert De Niro)
and her dream of getting her invention for a self-wringing mop off the ground,
aided by QVC’s ambitious head of programming, Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper).

In Joy, Russell wildly doubles-down on everything that earned him acclaim over the last five years.

Russell’s
fudging of the true story has become a trademark of his storytelling. As Fox
2000 president Elizabeth Gabler, who helped oversee Joy, recently admitted to Vanity Fair about the film, “[The plot] threads come from some places in Joy [Mangano]’s real story
and some places that came out of his imagination and other places that he just
picked up along the way of his life.” That comment is in keeping with a quote
Russell gave around the release of 2013’s American
Hustle, telling the Los Angeles Times
about American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter, “Each one of the people in
these movies begins in a place where their lives are in shambles. They don’t
know if they want to be who they are or if they want to live as they are. And
that’s how I felt back before these movies.” Add to this the fact that 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, based on a
novel by Matthew Quick about a man (Cooper) suffering from bipolar disorder,
reminded Russell of his own bipolar son, and you begin to see that Russell’s recent
films are part of a larger internal narrative in which the filmmaker pulled
himself back from the brink after he watched his career sputter and his
marriage end. Russell is hyperactively compassionate
toward his wounded characters, and he never stops seeing their potential for
greatness. He identifies with them too closely to give up on them.

With
Joy, though, he’s not really sharpening
the techniques he’s incorporated in his last three films. Russell’s early
career—a period that spanned his 1994 feature debut Spanking the Monkey and encompassed the screwball romance Flirting With Disaster, the caustic Iraq
War film Three Kings, and the
divisive, poorly-received 2004 existential comedy I Heart Huckabees—was marked by films flush with a cockeyed, often
wary perspective. Since then, Russell has focused on more accessible,
crowd-pleasing efforts, and Joy can
be viewed as a synthesis of what he’s done better in recent years. The colorful
supporting characters; the outlandish portrait of a highly dysfunctional family;
the roving camera that suggests the filmmaker’s giddy excitement about telling
this story; the emotional high points scored to iconic classic rock songs; the
sense that the movie is (barely) being held together by the exuberance of its
actors; the sheer movie-ness of the entire endeavor: Joy is yet another of Russell’s heart-on-its-sleeve piñatas that’s
ready to burst.

A
large part of the enjoyment of watching Russell’s films is wrapped up in the
anxious suspense of wondering if he can keep his speeding locomotive from
careening right off the tracks. Joy’s sense of heightened reality—its inability to calm down its pace for fear that it’ll break its feverish spell over us—makes it feel a bit like a caffeinated bedtime story translated to the big screen. Russell has described Joy as “a Cinderella without a prince” tale of female empowerment, an analogy
that makes sense when you consider that Joy must contend with a mean
half-sister (Elisabeth Röhm) and his father’s condescending, controlling new
girlfriend (Isabella Rossellini) who serves the role of a wicked stepmother all
too well.

A large part of the enjoyment of watching Russell’s films is wrapped up in anxious suspense. Can he keep his speeding locomotive from careening right off the tracks?

Russell
extends the fairytale analogy further, giving Joy someone who, in a more
conventional story, would be her Prince Charming. After constructing her
innovative mop, she meets Neil Walker, who is at first reluctant to put her
product on QVC. But after some twists and turns, Joy talks her way onto the
channel’s airwaves, which usually features celebrities or polished onscreen
hosts, and Russell films these a-star-is-born sequences with all the awestruck majesty
of Cinderella going to the ball. (The film reveals a sneaky sense of humor
about Joy’s ascendance on QVC: The bright studio lights and the rush of live
television are hypnotic to the young woman, even if the whole thing is actually
filmed in a chintzy studio in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania.)

These
moments at QVC—in which Russell acknowledges how real people’s lives are
distorted once you stick a camera in their face—are Joy’s most inspired and subversive, and they’re helped by Cooper’s
scene-stealing turn as a true believer in the power of salesmanship. Walker has
a rapport with Joy but, intriguingly, it’s not based on sexual chemistry but rather
a shared belief in getting what you want out of life by working hard and being
smarter than the next guy. It’s a faux-love story built on commerce instead of
amorousness, and Lawrence and Cooper display a potent, albeit different,
connection than the one they shared in Silver
Linings Playbook.

As
for Lawrence, her natural tartness cuts against Russell’s Cinderella affectations.
She plays Joy as a ground-down former golden child who rediscovers the mojo
that made her an inventive little girl, high school valedictorian, and the
apple of her loving grandmother’s eye. (The fairy-godmother-like grandma is
played by Diane Ladd, who sets her superficial performance to “impossibly
ethereal.”) Stuck in an ill-advised marriage to a struggling singer younger (an
enormously likeable Edgar Ramirez), Joy has waded through the same sort of
discontented adult life that she witnessed her own bickering parents go through
when she was a child. At last, she’s ready to forge her own path.

From
Winter’s Bone to the Hunger Games films, Lawrence has
relished playing characters in dire circumstances who channel an inner strength
to persevere. Joy isn’t as outlandish a construction as Lawrence’s characters
from Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, but that’s essential to
the movie’s moderate success: What always made Cinderella so empathetic was how
relatable and appealingly ordinary she was amidst the fantastical and trying
circumstances surrounding her.

Joy never misses a chance to overemphasize how supposedly magical
its character’s journey from suburban single mom to home-shopping mogul is.
(This is a film that includes not one but two separate scenes in which fake
snow falls from the sky to underline the moment’s otherworldly preciousness.) But
Lawrence won’t have any of it. As Joy
begins, a title card comes on screen announcing that the film is “Inspired by
the true stories of daring women. One in particular.” No doubt Russell comes by
his feminist sympathies sincerely, but it’s also a touch patronizing,
especially considering that the movie often allows its main character to get
through obstacles through convenient or farfetched means. Joy is best taken as a fairytale—a blithe metaphor for
self-determination—but Lawrence repeatedly grounds the fantasy in something genuine.
In that uncomfortable tension between a filmmaker’s flights of fancy and an
actress’s pragmatic grit, Joy might
very well speak to a lot of viewers who know that movies aren’t real life, but are
willing to pretend otherwise once in a while.